Song for Mixed Choir

“Song” is laid over two picture rolls, printed together. The first magnifies the grain of the film, filling the screen with the circling constituents of its material base. The second roll draws a succession of figures from a dimly lit nightlife. There is a dance, a house party and a subway turnstile moving toward the most domestic kind of horror, a horror of the commonplace and the mundane, the horrors of toothbrush and comb and electric lamp. “Song” is an image of cinema’s prehistory – before “in the beginning was the word” but also: before the domain of picture took shape in my imagination. First film.